Heinlein and Independence Day

Today, three days after Independence Day, is the 37th anniversary of the death of Robert Heinlein, who would have a thing or two to say about revolution in our time.

For some years now I’ve thought civic holidays in the US should have, whenever possible, a specific conceptual focus, as Thanksgiving Day already does. MLK Jr Day should be devoted to game theory, Columbus Day to learning about discovery and exploration in general, and so on.

The question we should openly discuss every July 4th is: are there prices too high to save the United States? My formulation is from Heinlein’s Guest of Honor speech, “The Future Revisited,” to the XIXth World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle in 1961:

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A Beautiful Day Spoiled

I am out in New Mexico for Independence Day weekend, checking on family. The small town where the folks live has a big public celebration every year with speeches, food, and booze – just the way the Founders intended, though I found the lack of rum punch disturbing.

Unfortunately, somebody let it be known that I spend time in the DC area, which led, wouldn’t you know it, several people from the settler-colonist crowd up by Santa Fe to come and introduce themselves. These are folks who move into the West from the blue coastal regions and decide their new home needs to be “modernized,” and start with all sorts of programs like bike lanes, lactation stations, and wanting to reintroduce wolves.

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Barbarity For You

Of all the malignant concepts spawned and promulgated through our so-called higher education institutions – things such as loathsome Corbusier-style concrete box architecture, modern so-called art which depends more on the manifesto accompanying the paint splatter or pile of trash, the managerial transferability of MBA-degree holders between any industry at all – I believe the worst and most damaging of all is the concept of oppressor/oppressed. In every dyad, one party is the oppressor and deserving of every action inflicted on them, and the other is the oppressed, who is totally justified in any action lashing back against the oppressor.

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Enablers of Mamdani: America’s Universities

Supporters for Mamdani tended to be more college-educated than those who voted for Cuomo; many have graduate degrees. One might find this surprising, since university graduates are supposed to have more knowledge about things like history and economics…and more ability to think clearly about things. But actually, it makes sense that Mamdani’s greatest strength is among college graduates, especially young college graduates. Why? Several reasons:

First, there’s student debt. A lot of people believed the promises about the right educational credentials practically guaranteeing a future income which would make any educational debt incurred almost trivial by comparison. Now they’ve found out that it isn’t so, and they are angry not at the educational institutions that benefited from their tuition, but on broader factors: ‘society’, or ‘boomers’, or, especially, ‘capitalism.’

Second, the education that many of these former students received encouraged them not only in an anti-capitalist attitude but in a broader hostility toward American society, hence priming them for a sense of resentment and an affinity for those promoting revolutionary change. In effect, this indoctrination largely immunized the universities they attended from blowback directed against themselves.

Third, there is a sense of entitlement coupled with a limited sense of options: the idea has been broadly promoted that college is the way to go for career success. At the same time the idea has been promoted that noncollege jobs (and noncollege people) are inherently inferior.  There is a feeling that “I did what they told me and now look where I am.”

Here’s an interesting email that Peter Thiel wrote to some Meta executives and board members back in 2020. Excerpt:

Nick — I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.

College debt has contributed to the negative-capital phenomenon, and what is taught in all too many colleges has contributed to the feeling that it’s impossible to get out of the negative capital trap.

Of course, Mamdani may not win the NY mayor’s race: only a small percentage of New Yorkers actually voted for him, and his extremism is sure to drive considerable pushback. But I’m afraid that we haven’t seen the last of the phenomenon he represents.  This post notes that:

The kids who were radicalised and indoctrinated into Critical Theory at elite universities in the 2010s are now in their mid 30s. And they’re starting to climb the ladder. Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York is just the first of many, I fear.

The marketing approach taken by the Mamadani campaign also bears examining.  @signulll says:

one under discussed part of the mamdani campaign was the usage of the video filters. every video used the same soft, humanizing tone consistently. it crafted a world around him. an aesthetic, almost utopian one. close shots, warm tones, delicate pacing.

it framed him as the delivery vehicle for a better feeling reality. beautifully cinematic. no surprise,

his mom is a well known filmmaker. this was vibe warfare. & he won. you have to understand how modern culture works in order to partake in it no matter what your underlying mission is.

…to which @Olivia_Reingold responded:

Filters are just the beginning.

Zohran is the director of a Hype House first and politician second.

From what I can tell, his team can shoot, produce, and edit a reel within an hour. That means there is about a ~60 minute lag time between when he appears in public, shaking hands in a given location somewhere in the city and the moment it goes live on his various channels.

Not every video of his gets uploaded to every one of his pages. They understood that their recent “Hot Girls For Zohran” video, in which esteemed political theorist Emily Ratajkowski declared that Zohran is like so totally cool, would preform better on Instagram than X, and so they pushed it primarily via Instagram reels and by adding @emrata as a collaborator to the post. T

hey are the kind of operation that would never be caught dead uploading a horizontal video to Instagram. This is a vertical-first shop. It’s the kind of team that makes Trump’s viral TikTok dance (the iconic shimmy) look cute. Zohran has introduced a new era that has instantly outdated that craze, making it look ‘so 2024’ in retrospect.

You’ll notice he cultivated virility without a signature dance, gesture, or gimmick. There was no TikTok dance that spread like wildfire. Merely supporting him became the meme.

All you need is a look at Cuomo’s feed to understand why the man got cooked.

(‘virility’ corrected to ‘vitality’ in comments)

I’m sure I’m not the only one who is reminded of a filmmaker named Leni Riefenstahl and her accomplishments in shifting the political winds in Germany. And no, I’m not asserting that Mamdani is equivalent to Riefenstahl’s client (although there are some points of similarity), but making the point that the aesthetics of the way that something is presented–in video or otherwise–can have a lot to do with how successful it is in the marketplace.

Your thoughts?

 

The Novel Way

This week I chanced upon watching the movie ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’, based on the recent bestselling novel. A relative rarity among novel forms of late, Guernsey Literary Etc. took the form of an epistolary novel, a conceit of plot and character-construction through letters from various characters. The movie version is a decent little movie; a relatively faultless evocation of a historical period, filmed mostly in charming rural locations and unscathed by any actor in it feeling a need to loudly bloviate on current social trends and controversies, at least as far as I know about.

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